Acts 4:32-35 – April 26, 2009

          Life is good. You all may disagree during this economic recession, but Life is Good is a registered and trademarked expression by the Life is Good people for who life is good. Perhaps you have seen the emblematic smiling face of Jake on a Life is Good T-shirt or coffee mug or Frisbee. No, not the yellow Smiley plastered on novelty merchandise in the ‘70s and later co-opted by Wal-Mart as the price rollback symbol, or a festival in Milwaukee. The Life is Good logo is a stick figure named Jake who wears a black beret, beatnik sunglasses, and flashes a giant Cheshire cat grin. Jake is often posed in any number of activities that bring simple pleasure to life – hiking, surfing, flying a kite, or walking the dog.

          Life is Good started inauspiciously as brothers Bert and John Jacobs hawked homemade, novelty T-shirts in the Boston streets and door to door through college dorms. They were literally living in their van down by the river. Their silver bullet was fired when they printed 48 shirts of permagrin Jake over the saying “Life is Good” for a street fair in Cambridge. The shirts sold out by noon. // Hold this thought as today we consider what Christian apostles are to do in a powerful way.//

          How can it be said of anyone who is part of a group that has been arrested, threatened, put in prison, beaten and killed, namely the early church, that life is good? The reading from Acts gives us some ideas, as does Randy Frazee in his book, The Connecting Church: Beyond Small Groups to Authentic Community. He notes three distinct values that must be rediscovered in Christian community today, and all three are reflected in the second scripture reading:

·        Common Purpose: replacing individualism with shared biblical values

·        Common Place: replacing isolation with a renewed focus on community within our neighborhoods

·        Common Possessions: replacing consumerism with voluntary resource interdependence.

Common Purpose Before getting into the radical concept of shared possessions, note the important opening verse, which makes everything else possible. “The group of followers all felt the same way about everything.” This is a challenge for a church like ours, which emphasizes diversity. The super successful churches nowadays are made up of people who all think pretty much alike.

 Common Place Technology has expanded and changed our circles of relationship. We can call, text, email, IM and Facebook each other. We can drive or fly to see people who live across the continent, or the equivalent of 100 days of biblical travel away from us. But this has made us more fractured people than connected people. We need to develop Christian community within geographic community. When we share proximity – meaning we don’t have to drive across town to connect with people – four essential relational characteristics emerge: spontaneity, availability, frequency, and hospitality.

If we want to develop deeper relationships that have more spontaneity, availability, frequency and hospitality, then perhaps we should start looking around us. We should look to build community within the community.

Common Possessions Perhaps the most staggering feature of the early church was the one that the New Testament reading focuses on primarily. There was one thing that made it clear that God was powerfully changing people. Believers disregarded privatized ownership in favor of a common purse. There is no way that happens apart from God.

On the other hand, we have come to believe that the sharing of our financial resources is an issue of deep sacrifice and not deep satisfaction. The truth is: Sharing is the Life is Good way to live. John Locke puts it concisely: “If we needed things we couldn’t buy, many of us would have more friendships.” As our delegation from Milwaukee Presbytery develops friendships with our Presbyterian partners in Ghana this summer, I hope we can learn how it is they can be such a happy, friendly people and be effective as a church, when they have so little. //

The late Joseph Sittler (a professor at Princeton Seminary, I think) commented on how humans are tempted to see God mainly as a help only in our secluded and private moments and as a God for all of society only secondarily. “We have a God for my personal ache and hurt, but no God for the problems of human life in the great world.” He added, “This is where the church has tended to be privatistic, solitary, filled with religious sentiment of a personal kind. “We need not abolish that aspect, “Sittler said, “but it should not have undue importance. We must expand our doctrine of God to acknowledge that he is not only the Lord to whom I flee in times of trouble, but he is also the maker of heaven and earth – God of all that is. When we say we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life,’ the reference is not just to religious life, devotional life, and prayer-book life.” //

This year is the 500^th anniversary of the birth of John Calvin, the founder of the Presbyterian/Reformed tradition. An aspect of Calvinist tradition is social ethics. Social ethics is not a modern day phenomenon; it has been around for 500 years. We will be discussing this next week, as the Adult Education opportunity studies the Social Creed of 2008, approved by last year’s General Assembly. //

The apostles gave powerful witness to the resurrection of the Master Jesus, and grace was on all of them. Thus, apostles of Jesus Christ tell everyone that the Lord Jesus is alive. Let us see that sharing is the Life is Good way to live. Life always seems to have plenty of difficulty and suffering to spread around. What we need is a group of people around us with whom to shoulder the burdens of life. We need people who will draw us toward interdependence and away from individualism, isolationism and consumerism. We need biblical community. That is the good life. May we learn how to live it, to the glory of God.